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There is nothing like some sort of politically charged event to make you aware of how ignorant/ill-informed/racist/jingoistic/xenophobic your friends and family are when you dare to look at your Facebook timeline. Whether it is a trumped-up war (invented by the war companies to sell more war (thanks Blaine Capatch)), or immigration, or a shooting by a lowly civilian with the audacity to have a gun, or protests in Ferguson you can be sure that someone will be echoing the absurd views some television hack came up with to be exciting or controversial in order to get ratings and keep a job. It’s like reading the lowest common denominator write policy for the major political parties. It can also be exhausting if you make the mistake of engaging.

The thing with the Facebook Philosophers is that they can’t change their the mind or consider different views because they didn’t think of or consider the views they now hold as gospel. Far from being logically consistent, the standard rule of such philosophies are their inconsistencies and hypocrisies. While scolding the blacks rioting and looting in Ferguson to get jobs – as if that were easy or even a possible solution – they will then turn around and scold immigrants for working tirelessly and thanklessly and against the obstacles stacked against them by a hostile government. An angry, gun-toting person opens fire in public *checks for a badge or uniform* scream about why anyone is allowed to have guns. Cops shoot kids and the unarmed or roll their tanks and commandos out into a neighborhood and they cheer the guns and show of force. We’ve been bombing, manipulating governments, pillaging resources, and generally destroying an entire region for fifty years: GO TEAM! Somebody has the audacity to try and fight back: THEY’RE EVIL AND MUST BE CLEANSED FROM THE EARTH!

Part of the problem is there is no logic in fear; it is just lashing out desperately. But what would a middle-class suburban mom have to fear? Missing out on the big sale down at Megamart? Not being invited to the gossip circle? Having to wait another year to get a new SUV? Worrisome, all, but the fear is of the unknown and the messy and the loss of unacknowledged privilege. This privilege is manifest in the illusion that we live in a functioning, fair, and just society, and the privilege is that we are allowed and encouraged to believe it. Some…many don’t have that privilege; there is no illusion of justice or fairness and life gets messy quickly when living in such a society. Ask the people fighting for a voice in suburban St. Louis tonight how easy it is to get a job with a sub-par education or arrests for the same drugs that run rampant in affluent, suburban, mostly-white schools. Ask them how easy it is to have hope and optimism when walking down the street can get you harassed by the police, and there is no channel for recourse or justice. Ask them why they can’t speak out more reasonably when the weight of the whole system is there pushing them down, suffocating them. How can there be a conversation about classes of citizenship when all you can tell these protestors is “Do what you’re told and you won’t be killed?”

These recent protests and the responses and pretty much every political conversation in the mainstream for the last 200 years has been thrashing around in the leaves and branches, pruning and shaping the problem while the poisonous root thrives and grows. “There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” (H.D. Thoreau). Even the police forces in the thick of these situations are a branch of this tree being fed by the poisoned root. Privilege and the branches themselves keep most people from seeing the root, if they even choose to look. The police and the oppressed and even we casual observers are all locked into this system that creates explosive situations. This system of governance and control is the root of so many of our ills, even to the point of poisoning our brains and perspectives, where we consider control normal and desirable. We’ve been educated to accept the Stockholm Syndrome as normal and status quo. Pruning a few branches isn’t going to solve any of our problems, but extricating roots is hard work. Maybe it is time to start getting our hands dirty.

I’ve decreed that today is actually THE FUTURE. Well, maybe it started last night, but, oh nevermind. TODAY is the FUTURE. [dramatic music].

First thing this morning, I see that Space X had unveiled a new spacecraft for carrying up to 7 astronauts into space – specifically the International Space Station (ISS). Since the Space Shuttle program was ended, all flights carrying crew to the ISS were on the Russian Soyuz. This development moves space even further into the private sector and out of the public sector. Exciting!

Space!

Also on the private space flight front, Virgin Galactic got FAA approval for commercial launches. Soon, there will be the first small steps toward private, non-governmental business spaceflight. While this may entail a flight to altitudes considered “space” and returning, who knows what will stem from this. Super fast/expensive freight or travel from point A to point B? I don’t know, but it is progress. Screw the flying cars; I’m going to space!

More Space!

Of course, next to these two stories in my timeline is a story about teleportation. WHAT?!

Beam Me Up!

If that wasn’t trippy enough, the House of Representatives have started to demonstrate a modicum of sense in regards to the drug war and the 10th Amendment. Today may be the first blow struck to start rolling back the prohibition on marijuana. It may not seem like much of a concession that they just aren’t going to fund federal raids, but it is a complete reversal of all prior policy.

Call Off the Dogs

There is much happening that is decentralizing our society and freeing everybody from the hub of government and central control, not just those reported above, but everyday. Technology is making information ubiquitous. If controlling the information is a very powerful tool for governments to maintain control – witness the lap dog press or outright state-run press in any country – then consider how difficult it is to control information in this technological climate and draw your own conclusions. Not only is information becoming decentralized, but the need for any leviathan institution for production, management, financing, or really any endeavor is fast, if not already, becoming obsolete. Technology and information are chiseling away at the last pillars of legitimacy of government. Welcome to your government-less future.

Every so often I’ll peruse my drafts folder to unearth some bits of hastily written wisdom or quagmire of a piece of writing longing to be abandoned completely. To close the book on them and to actually post something in this space that nobody sees, I’ll publish them incomplete or tie an ugly, inadequate bow on them and send them out into the world to finally be forgotten. This is one of those posts.

Slow Ride

[This is something I started probably 3-3 1/2 years ago, before I changed jobs. Common to most changes that are essentially lateral moves, the change is refreshing…until it becomes stale, too, which is about now, I suppose.]

When I got my current job about 8 years ago it was like getting on the freeway. Things were progressing fast and the scenery was often new. Now it seems I’m stuck behind a bus with a powder blue Buick, cloth top, left blinker on pacing beside me at 45 mph. Nobody is going anywhere. The far left lanes speed along as I watch.

[The rest of my notes said to discuss the soul-suffocating culture of the cubical, but that probably isn’t going to happen. My will to finish this was, in fact, crushed by the job culture in which I exist. Cubicles, themselves, aren’t the problem, but just a symptom of the larger disease. They are a symptom that says we are resources to be exploited and filed away, easily replaced if lost or broken, and contained in a bureaucracy that doesn’t encourage or allow growth or advancement. Stay in your compartment, Cog!]

Anarchy: Head, Heart, or Hands?

[A little unfinished examination of the different flavors of anarchist I encountered through all my reading, which is admittedly narrow. Started this in 2009.]

Anarchy is a term that comes with an extreme amount of connotational baggage. Without any sort of etymology or thought, the word anarchist or anarchy is a word used for the sake of shock value or fear mongering. Like invoking the name Hitler, using the term anarchy is supposed to summon the worst thoughts of evil, pandemonium, violence, and essentially the unknown (booga, booga!). The confusion isn’t terribly surprising, though, since even anarchists don’t always hold similar definitions of the term. Anarchy (an·archy) simply means without (an) rulers (archy), and considering the tremendous number of ways people try to rule one another, there can be equally as many ways to oppose that rule. The definition, though almost totally misunderstood in the mainstream, isn’t nearly as important as the substance of such a belief or how one goes about believing it.

The belief in an anarchist means of existence manifests itself in a few different ways, including intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Depending on the individual personality traits of the anarchist, one or more of these manifestations will come to the forefront. In cases such as myself, I followed a progression emphasizing the various manifestations at different times, one building on the other.

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One can come to anarchy in many ways. There is no one true path or doctrine; it is anarchy after all. Individuals look upon the concepts and the goals through different lenses and combinations of lenses; the intellectual lens, the emotional lens, and the hands-on lens. The justifications and arguments for anarchy share a similarly wide array as the approaches toward achievement.

The intellectual lens involves much philosophical argument, prognostication, and strategizing. When the strategizing becomes overly focused on the pragmatic (not to be confused with the hands-on lens) politics can come into play, which opens a major (maybe the largest) schism in this particular lens. This lens focuses much on what the world of anarchy will look like and trying to answer all the questions of non-anarchists definitively, regardless of how contrary to the whole idea of anarchy this systematic planning can be (though, to be honest, this prognostication isn’t so much for the benefit of anarchists themselves).

The emotional lens differs from the intellectual lens in that the future and arguments for the foreseen organization of society, including the justifications thereof, aren’t focused on. Instead issues of social justice and the crying out against the wrongs of the current organizations and memes takes precedent. The emotional lens lends itself to passionate arguments and grandiose speech, while avoiding specific prescriptions.

The hands-on lens tends to by-pass the arguments of the other two lenses and moves promptly to direct personal action. Where the other two lenses have a much larger, society-wide focus, the hands-on lens focuses on the individual alone and freeing the individual from the constraining social organizations antithetical to anarchism, for instance by gulching or agorism.

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[This is a hint of a rant that never got any further and is not significant…for now.]

So far the overwhelming response of the righteous Enlightened Liberal Progressive Opinion Complex to Newtown is predictably that some laws, regulations, or government regulatory miracle will fix this kind of unpredictable tragedy, thus adding their brick to this wall of violence we call our American culture.

When my friend told me “The best part of having kids are the toys,” I couldn’t believe it. My life had drifted far away from such frivilous things as toys and playing and silliness. I was concerned with more serious matters like the economy, politics, and how some systemic injustice was causing all of my unhappiness. For a while, A__ and I were the couple from the beginning of Idiocracy (and while that film didn’t push us to have children, I won’t say it never crossed our minds – as narcissistic as that is). It didn’t take long after having our first child to figure out that a sizeable majority of interaction with kids is through play. (Was I hoping for conversation?) Along with reading, it’s this interaction that helps development, learning, and bonding with your kids.

My child’s requests of me are typically to play cars or trains or puzzles or games. It could involve building a track for the trains to run, or stacking as many Legos as possible to make a giant tower…er, doghouse for a tiny Lego dog to reside in, or building any number of word or cartoon puzzles, or even just chasing one another around the center of the house from room to room. Read the rest of this entry »

(Not sure what happened here. Posted from my phone and it looks normal in draft.)

(Found it! Missing quotation mark in the link tag.)

When trying to sort through the new feelings and fears of having children as a mature[ish] adult, it never occurred to me that much of that fear and pressure came from an unlikely event. First, your status has changed from someone’s kid to someone’s parent. This status change comes with a sudden sense of empathy and camaraderie with your parents that was impossible before. Second, and this comes later on as the infant grows up some, you are now revered by someone. Based on my experience with reverence, this isn’t going to end well.

Whether it’s fate, destiny, a foregone conclusion, or whatever, reverence for real things can’t end well. Reverence usually comes from an unrealistic view or opinion with little basis in the whole reality. As the whole reality is revealed, the reverence fades and sometimes swings into disgust based on the prior high opinion. My fear of my children’s future fallen high opinion of me I covered in Reflections Upon a Coffee Mug II. My other experiences with reverence were pretty much institutions. Maybe, maybe, there was reverence for government or at least parts of it. This whole site may indicate how that ended. Religion fell to the next institution (sort of) I once revered. The institution of higher education was once a beacon of purity and truth in my mind. Today I heard the marketing for a university that spoke the rhetoric of a revered institution and not the fulcrum of a giant, planet-moving lever of social engineering and money laundering juggernaut and I shook my head and started writing.

All of these once-revered things, as all non-ethereal objects of reverence must, at the very least crashed back to reality and in the case of institutions crashed and burned. Institutions never end up even in the neutral on the revere/disgust scale. As a parent who has unearned reverence thrust upon them by fate, the pressure comes in holding onto it as long as possible, and earning it eventually is the grand prize. This is both inspiring and scary as hell.

Considering the origins of Christianity, it’s not surprising that they have a deep-seated persecution complex. The same origin – and the entire history that followed – also belies an incredible denial of history. I have tried to mostly ignore the drummed up “War on Christmas” for as long as possible, but I am beset on all sides, whilst trying in vain to pass peacefully by, with badgering cries to stop persecuting their beliefs. Just try to get away, I dare you. I have the same non-existent qualms about saying “Merry Christmas” as I do saying “Nice Chrysler.” Technically, Jesus would also be the reason for the vehicle, too, right?

Black powder burns really, really fast, but doesn’t explode unless confined (see link below). It isn’t until this release of energy is confined, like a bullet casing, that things start exploding. People interacting are like black powder: sometimes things flare up and stuff goes wrong, but things are much more dangerous when confined, by systems of oppression, for example, or circumstance. So even without the usual mechanisms for confinement and control that come with authoritarian relationships, circumstance can trigger a result of the occasional explosion from these flare-ups. But to support a society where these circumstances are institutionalized is to create a weapon, a fully automatic machine gun that is driven by strife and conflict.

The institutionalization of control and power that has manifested itself in everything from our government to state-sanctioned commerce acts to restrict people’s’ options and freedom and exercise control to subjugate them for exploitation. Restricting everything from one’s livelihood: how they can work, for how much they can work, how much of that alloted earnings they can keep, how they can spend the remainder, and who they can work for; to their lifestyle: where they can live, how they can live, and who they can live with, not only adds fire to the keg of powder each of us becomes as our freedom is continually frustrated, but limits options so that we powder kegs feel confined with no suitable outlet. The whole situation adds up to explosions. Many of us find little outlets and means of dealing with the frustration, either out of a need to not harm others or not to harm ourselves, thus avoiding disastrous explosions. Still others can’t avoid the explosions forever. We call them terrorists or mentally ill, but what if their actions are a sane reaction to the conditions they have been subjected to? What if, instead of training ourselves to take the abuse and exploitation more passively and calling it “healthy”, we look at the structure of our society and our desire to fit into it without disruption “sick”?

This weekend, two boys were convicted of raping a drugged girl at a series of high school parties. The details of the case are disturbing, as are the details of any rape case. In fact, it was reported that she was digitally raped, which somehow doesn’t seem as bad as more violent rapes (not saying it is better). The part of this story of this Steubenville Rape Case that elevates it a few levels is the conspiracy to brush the whole thing under the rug by a shocking number of adults in this town, and how this sort of thing is pretty much institutionalized into the community around their football team.I’m not going to rehash the details of this case as there are plenty of other better sources, but I do want to use this story to demonstrate how institutions work. As Butler Shaffer wrote about in his book “Calculated Chaos,” institutions become less about the purpose for which it was formed or organized and becomes about protecting its very existence.

Football has become an institution willing to sacrifice education and morality to further the institution in Steubenville. Read the rest of this entry »

There may not be a person alive that has been able to honestly look back upon their life and not found embarrassment over some event or action or thought. This is all a part of growing and maturing. I talked of this a bit in Extreme Moderation way back in 2008, but focused more on how I jumped into ideas with radical fervor and then mellowed, as if I had to go full Anikan Skywalker and destroy all the existing beliefs totally before I could be comfortable wavering from the new-found ideas. Now, as I look back, I see lots of changes in my thinking.

I feel I could write rebuttals to my old posts. Not all of the rebuttals would be drastic and likely contain no 180-degree shifts, but mostly there would be subtle changes that make, what I currently feel, important distinctions. So maybe they wouldn’t be rebuttals so much as added nuance. As I occasionally indulge my ego and randomly read from the archives, some of the things that stick out are my attitude toward things or the manner in which I had written it. Perhaps I just didn’t communicate the thoughts well enough; I probably got lazy or lost track of the thought before I could finish and simply tied an awkward bow on it and hit publish to be done with it. Not to mention just the overall quality of the writing itself, which I’ll leave for judgement as harsh as necessary.

Awkward bow: Anyway, I could have written this is a tweet: @pintofstout I have been blogging long enough that I could write rebuttals to my own old posts. #progress. Sukghrghaougaoivbmi